Saturday, January 8

Progress and prognosis

Last night I reached term #35000 in my evaluation of A179066. I had been trying a few program improvements on yet a fourth copy of Mathematica to see if I could speed things up a little. Most of these didn't really pan out — the overhead of the new code canceling any hoped-for benefits — but one obvious implementation did shave some time off the calculations, so I aborted my run and started the new routine from where I left off. Now I am about to pass term #70000 and — putting one of my two Ruth-Aaron-pairs tabulations on hold in order to devote more CPU muscle to this — tomorrow morning I should be passing term #100000.

My expectation is that — any day now — someone else will have calculated all 1124577 terms and that will be the end of my effort. In particular, Maximilian Hasler — who co-authored A179066 with Eric Angelini — thinks that "it should not take that long".